Friends of Dave #399: 🍦seaweed soft serve 💫
What do Pina Coladas, Jenny Jenny and Sister Christian have in common?
Gonna keep this one short this week, Friends.
Strongly suggest you use the time and dig into the Tom Brady article I’m sharing — applies to how people can contribute to teams more effectively. It’s on the longer side but reads fast — you can also listen to it if you want.
But….
Here’s some completely random thing I found my mind wandering and thinking about on my drive back from our summer break last week:
You know all of those songs you loved to listen to when you were younger? Particularly the ones that had characters and the lyrics told a story?
Ever wonder whatever happened to those people?
For example:
Take the couple from the Piña Colada Song. Despite realizing they both loved a certain alcoholic drink, bad weather, getting busy only at a certain hour in the evening and a common hate for bureaucracy, something tells me it didn’t work out. Sure, they probably lasted a few more years together and had a couple of kids they named Buddy and Farrah (guests that were on the Tonight Show on the nights they were conceived), but his passive aggressiveness and her blunt reactions to it probably came to a head one day in the car, in traffic, after ANOTHER trip to Cape Cod. They both can be found using their now arthritic, geriatric fingers swiping right and left on elder Tinder and Bumble.
Jessie’s Girl . Rick, I’ve got good news for you. If you are still pining for her, you can stop stalking her on Facebook. I’m pretty sure you can probably now find Jessie’s girl or plenty of girls like her in an assisted living facility somewhere in New Jersey. You can play charades, recount all of the moot points you want from the past, tell her all about General Hospital and your podcast and I am sure you will finally get lucky.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I will go to the grave convinced that Billie Jean and her son really dodged a bullet. She found a nice stable accountant to marry sometime in the 90s, he adopted her son (named Sleeping Bag when he was born, but changed his name to Jackson) and raised him as his own, and had a stable life somewhere in Missouri — FAR AWAY FROM NEVERLAND. Good for you Billie Jean.
Jenny Jenny, whose phone number became eternally memorized by millions of people globally, got her 💩 together and finally stopped being an easy score for sleazy, needy loser guys. FUN FACT: Jenny is actually the mother of the Hawk Tuah girl.
If only Brenda and Eddie had known about how people weirdly gossiped about their high school popularity years later over bottles of wine in a completely over rated Italian place and that the part everyone really liked best about their relationship was waving good bye to them….such fake friends they had….maybe with a better support system around them they could have gone to couples therapy and it could have worked out.
Sister Christian never did find Mister Right, but she actually used her brother’s constant nagging to finally say “okay.” She discovered the relentless entrepreneurial spirit that her brother always saw in her and channeled that to start the company that eventually turned into Expedia. Now we all know the price of flights, hotels and car rentals. Thank you, Sister Christian.
Yes, sadly, this is what happens when I have an open road, Sirius XM radio and some free time, Friends…
Have a good one.
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
Since 1979, the top income earners in America have seen their real wages grow at more than double the rate of every other income group.
Given this rapid rise, income inequality in the U.S. exceeds nearly every other rich nation, driven by several complex factors. Among these, tax policy, technological change, and economic downturns have widened this gap. Diminishing bargaining power across workers has also contributed to wage disparities.
This graphic shows the growth in real wages over time across income groups, based on data from the Economic Policy Institute.
It may seem odd that a person could be happy as the end draws near, but turns out, it’s not that uncommon. A study in Psychological Science shows that people nearing death use more positive language to describe their experience than those who just imagine death. This suggests that the experience of dying is more pleasant – or, at least, less unpleasant – than we might picture it.
Has it ever occurred to you that Dairy Queen does not refer to its ice cream as, well, ice cream? While it has all the characteristics of ice cream DQ isn't legally able to call it such. Thus, the chain settled on "soft serve." You will be surprised to see what really is in this….😱
Leadership comes down to two things: Do you care about your teammates and their role on the team? And do you care about winning, which is what you’re ultimately trying to do together?
EASILY THE BEST THING I HAVE READ RECENTLY: When our society talks about leaders, we focus on formal roles, such as the CEO. This view undervalues the role of informal leaders—team members who influence outcomes by the tone they set, how they conduct themselves, and how they interact with their peers. Their job title doesn’t include the word “manager,” but they play an outsize role in how teams perform. Article co-written by Tom Brady in HBR — long one but worth it.